Engaging with Race and Sexualities: Sexuality Education Research with Young People in Australia and New Zealand

• In Event: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn: Bonding In/difference Across Academic Activisms

Abstract

Speaking from our respective positionalities we draw on a range of theories and methodologies to explore the challenges and opportunities of developing a research partnership with Indigenous and religiously diverse researchers. Our attempts to bring together queer, feminist post-structural and post-colonial theoretical and methodological approaches have proved challenging, destabilising and also generative.


We discuss epistemological and methodological approaches that work towards holding differing knowledge systems in productive tension. Povinelli’s (2002) critique of late liberalism in settler societies has been integral to our thinking about how researchers in sexuality might dialogue across difference without using that dialogue as a tool of salvation or redemption, common tropes in queer studies in education.


We see this research project as a messy and affective culture in the making (Browne & Nash, 2010) where we are conceptualizing shifting positionalities and intersubjective relationalities. Conceptualising the research partnership as characterized by paradox and struggle (Derrida, 1992), underscores a partnership in a state of rhizomatic becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) rather than arrival.


Our research project Sex education in Australia and New Zealand: responding to cultural and religious difference (authors, Allen & Sanjakdar 2011) draws on classroom observations and focus groups to explore religiously and culturally diverse secondary students’ experiences of school based sexuality education. Our focus is on tensions and possibilities that emerge in different researcher’s analysis of this data.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

Developing research coalitions can be both challenged and enhanced through an ongoing engagement with the epistemological, ontological and methodological implications of epistemological pluralism (Andreotti, 2009; 2011). We excavate the messy, paradoxical affective lived everydays of building research partnerships (Browne & Nash, 2010).


Research on sexuality can be utilized to produce difference when it is read against specific cultural practices. A “critical theory of recognition” (Povinelli, 2002: 17) that apprehends how the politics of culture affects different bodies in specific and differential ways is fundamental in understanding how sexual citizenship is unevenly distributed, and also suggests some limitations of discourses that rely on sexual citizenship.

References

Andreotti, Vanessa, Cash Ahenakew, and Garrick Cooper. (2011). “Epistemological pluralism: challenges for higher education,” Alternative Journal, 7(1):40-50.

Andreotti, Vanessa. (2010). “Global education in the ‘21st century’: Two different perspectives on the ‘post-’ of postmodernism,” International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning 2(2): 5–22.

Authors., Allen, L. & Sanjakdar, F. (2011). Sexuality Education In Australia And New Zealand: Responding to Cultural and Religious Difference.

Browne K. & Nash, C. (2010) Introduction. In K. Browne & C. Nash (Eds.) Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. London: Ashgate. pp 1-25

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press

Derrida, J. (1992). Force of law: The mystical foundation of authority. Trans M Quaintance. In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfield & D. Carlson (Eds.) Deconstruction and the possibility of justice. New York/London: Routledge

Povinelli, E. (2002). The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Authors

• Kathleen Anne Quinlivan, University of Canterbury

• Mary Louise Rasmussen, Monash University

• Clive Aspin, The University of Sydney